Nokia Seeks Work With Competitors

By

Arild Moen

Feb 18, 2011 3:44 pm GMT

A question asked by a Nokia shop steward to a Nokia Corp. executive on a TV talk-show in Finland on Thursday quite neatly summed up current morale and uncertainty among the company’s engineers: would it be wise for us developers to start specializing on the Windows Phone operating system? The answer: too early to tell.

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile handsets, which last week announced a tie-up with Microsoft Corp. as part of a major shift in strategy, will see numerous job cuts. The company said it will use Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main smartphone platform, cutting research and development in its own platform, Symbian, which has struggled to compete with more consumer-driven rivals like Apple Inc.’s iPhone and smartphones based on Google Inc.’s Android platform.

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